Mindbond (24 page)

Sunset, the color of my sword, then bright orange as of highmeadow poppies, sea stacks sleek and dark against it, like great seals. And blood-red sky dimming into purple. Dusk deepening into shining night—stars, full moon rising over the mountains, gleaming off the eversnow. Kor and Tass and I sat amidst it all, eating roast partridge and mussels steamed in eelgrass and the tender spring sprouts of celery and sparrowgrass that grew where soil gathered on ledges near the cascades. It was a blessed twilight. Odd, how such warm and peaceful times come even in the midst of trouble, but it must be so or we would go mad.… Pushing aside my dark mood for a while, I ate the shellfish and grinned at Kor, mocking myself. He gave me his grave, quiet smile, and Tassida hummed snatches of song and gazed at the sky, seeing stories there. Times to come, I cherished the memory of that night.

The white maiden lay in her cairn under the moonlight, and the rocks glinted where we had piled them.

Not long after full dark, when stars splattered the sky like foam, there was a splashing in the surf, and we looked. There were seals in the breakers, seals surging up the beach like the waves, seals to the number of half a hundred or more, many-colored under the moonlight. The three of us sat by our dying fire and watched as they left the sea and dragged themselves far up on the sand, much farther than was the custom of seals, up to where the mound of the fresh cairn shone, and in a press of sleek bodies they pooled around it.

Then in a few moments they had undone what it had taken us all day to do. Rocks flew as if out of a thunder cone, flung upward and back by pointed snouts and strong necks. They laid low the cairn, pulled the covering back from the sea maiden with their teeth—

And as soon as one of them touched her he stood by her in human form, and so soon also did the rest. Sea folk, sylkies, Kor's distant kindred, to the number of fifty or more. The white maiden's people, and every one of them as beautiful as she, and as strange. Hair that flowed and shimmered, seal-black or red-brown as wrack or shell-tan or sea-foam white, down to the shoulders of the men, below the waists of the women. They were lissome, the women, but for once my eyes caught on the men, for they were different from any people I had ever seen. Long necks, narrow sloping shoulders, chests of the same breadth as their midriffs, and their long, loose-jointed hands and feet moved at odd angles. Their skins, hairless and sleek, and their cocks, like the breasts of the women, small. But manly and tall they stood, their heads high, their movements graceful, and though their bodies were slight I sensed all the power of the sea in them. And their faces, comely and fearsome. Wonder moved me to mindspeak to Kor.

I would not want to meet any one of them in fair fight!

Nor would I. They look as potent as tide surge, and as mute.

There had been not a sound from any of them. But we sensed a silent uproar—one of the tall men had lifted the white maiden in his arms, and others were holding the pelts, the deerskin, the otter cloak. And there were touchings, fluid movements of quick hands, as if they were speaking in that way. And the pool of them swirling like boiling water.

“I knew it was wrong,” Tass muttered, and as she spoke she was on her feet and striding down the beach toward the strangers, looking very much the warrior and a daughter of earth next to their small-boned beauty. She carried the white seal pelt in her hands. “Here it is, people of the sea!” she called aloud.

And Kor, confound him, went after her, holding his own dark, dappled pelt. “Take this one, too,” he said roughly. “Never again will any king of the Seal Kindred go to court Mahela. I have sworn it.” He thrust the pelt toward them.

“Blast it!” I whispered. Then I found my own sealskin, light brown with a sheen as of sunstuff, as beautiful as any pelt I had ever seen, and I loved it as I did my own body. “Blast it,” I grumbled again, and I trailed after the others and offered the limp thing wordlessly to the sylkies.

The white maiden's people had stopped their eddying and stood gazing at us. No fear in them, but much thought—we were envoys from a different world from theirs. They measured us with their stares, then reached a silent agreement among themselves. With slow ceremony three men of their number stepped before us where we stood in an uneasy row. We gave the sealskins back to their long hands, back to the sea. And when my eyes met the eyes of the one who faced me in the moonlight, my breath stopped. It was a glance out of depths beyond my knowing, time before time, like the speechless glance of an animal, full of the ardor that has no voice, but a hundred times wiser, more centered—and utterly, painfully, mute.

Mindspeak?
I hazarded, facing that mute gaze. But I knew it could not be, as indeed it was not. The sylkies' minds were of a different nature from ours, their thoughts swam to truth while ours plodded and crawled.

We turned to go back to our fire. But they stopped us, each of us, with a touch. Out of our depth, awkward and awed, we stood with them as they prepared to honor the white maiden.

They placed all the pelts, their own plus the ones we had given them, fifty or more, in a great, soft pile centered on the beach, the white sealskin on top. And there they laid the dead sea maiden, as if on a bed made of all their lives, her head pillowed on their lives. She lay as gracefully as if she only slept. Then they formed a circle around her, us three mortals among them, and began the magic dance that needs no music but the music of the mind.

Like the waves of the sea they wove the dance, cresting and dipping and cresting again, tossing their heads, whitecaps beneath stormwind, flowing together as breakers flow an ebb at the strand, circling past and between one another, ocean swell, intermingling in a pattern beyond my comprehension. Like the serpentine of the sea their arms rose and fell. My skill could not begin to match theirs, and after a few rounds of the dance I stood aside, bidding farewell in my own way to the maiden who had been a white seal, who had saved my life. A soundless farewell, while the dance swirled between us—the half a hundred of the sylkies seemed as vast as the world-sundering ocean.

Kor danced this weaving sea-wave dance better than I, for it was in his blood, that wild grace, But he tired soon, and stood beside me. Tassida joined us, and after a while we walked back up the beach to where our fire had died down to embers and ashes, sat there and watched. The sea folk did not see us go, I felt sure. They were well into the trance of the dance, and I drifted into one too, watching them, their hair billowing and flying like spindrift, the white maiden so still in their midst, ingathered, floating.… I felt as if I were floating with her—I swayed where I sat, my eyelids closed but the dance circled on in my mind, my dreaming.

Sometime before the moon began to set they took her back to the sea. For when I awoke they and all the pelts were gone.

I awoke when the moon stood high, because Tassida's hand lay on my arm.

Danger, I thought at first. I sat up quickly. But the night was still, and the touch of Tassida's hand steady and soft, and her handsome face sober but not alarmed in the moonlight. Kor lay sleeping beside me, quiet, unmoving. I looked at Tass for a moment, and she answered my gaze. Then I got up and followed her away from where Kor lay.

She took me up beyond the edge of the beach, into the wind-bent spruce woods, along a small trail that followed rock ridges to where her shelter stood. A man-shelter shape in the moonshadow, nothing more … She guided me in under the leather flap that closed the door, let it fall behind me. I could not yet believe what was happening.

“Tass?” I whispered, questioning.

Touch of her hand showed me the way. The bed was made of spruce boughs. She had brought furs to lay on it. After she had spread them, she sat there and guided me to the space beside her.

“Tass—” My heart was pounding so, it made a roaring as of stormside surf inside my head. I could say nothing more than her name.

“I should never have touched you,” she murmured.

“Tassida?”

“I touched you, to bring you out of your seal form. I thought it was you, shining like sunset, Kor lying beside you, the devourers coming from all directions. I touched you to be sure, helped you both to make the change, and now—”

I understood. My way of becoming a seal had been different from Kor's. “You desire me, as Birc once desired a deer maiden.”

“It is more than that. I have always wanted you.”

My heart, leaping like wildfire.

“Dan, please. Lie with me. Now, before—before my courage fails me.”

“Tass,” I breathed, and I did not ask her whether she loved me, then or ever. My love for her filled the night and left no room for any want of my own, except that I wished I could see her.

My Tass, my love. Beloved like no other. A warrior's muscles beneath her smooth skin, but she trembled like a dove under my hand. My Tass, with the brow of a hero and sweet virgin breasts … Not since I had been a callow young oaf, myself untried, had I taken a girl's maidenhead, and I had hurt her. This time I must do better, far better, for Tass.

Ai, that night. Moment by warm pressing moment I led her along the soft, venturing ways of love, and when she hung back I waited for her, I coaxed her. I was the salmon tide, she, the river. I was rainstorm and she the meadow. And learning not to be afraid she welcomed me, her quivering ceased, she gave me her trust, her lips moved against mine, her hands moved to caress me. She was shy, bold, awkward, passionate. She was all the world, my Tass. I could have wept. She was amaranth, the flower of Sakeema, blossoming for me.… I think I have never been so gentle in lovemaking, so careful yet so ardent. I played upon her as she might have played upon a harp, I brought her to song's height, hands on her breasts, she arched her strong back under me, and when I melted into her any pain she might have felt was magicked into ecstasy—

Kor was there, with us.

His presence, in my mind. The three of us, together. I laid my face down on Tassida's shoulder, tears and sweat on my face, her fingers twined into my hair, my chest heaving against hers. And now that it was over, I wondered if she truly loved me, but I could not ask, for Kor's sake. I ached.

“Tass …” It was a plea, I hardly knew for what.

“I love you, Dan. Since those first days, I always have.” A catch in her voice that caught at my heart. “I love you … because of the way you love Kor.”

His presence, there with us, though his body still lay on the beach where we had left him, I felt sure of it. We did not speak further of him, Tass and I, because he was a tale to which we did not know the ending, a song half-remembered, a face in the dark.

“So much I love you … I am afraid.”

For the first time I began to understand her.

“And I love you, I am half-mad with fighting my love for you,” I whispered to her. “And I also am afraid. Of you. Of Kor. Tass, what are we going to do?”

Her silence gave me the answer, that there was no answer. I withdrew from her gently and found my clothing, wrapped on my lappet and leggings.

“Dan, stay. Where are you going?” A quiet edge came into her voice. “Are you afraid to sleep here with me?”

There had been no thought in me until then of the matter of Calimir, of how Kor and I had once joked that she was likely to alter a lover in the night.

“Do you wish me to give you my knife?” she asked bitterly. “For safekeeping?”

My hands froze in their motions, and more starkly than ever I wished I could see her face, and she mine. Looking at me, she could have seen better truth.

“Tass,” I told her softly, “as far as I am able, I must spare Kor.”

“But it is no use trying to hide this from him,” she said just as softly. “He will know. I think he knows already. Have you not felt it?”

Her words frightened me anew. “Yes,” I said, fear or anger roughening my voice. “Yes, blast it, I felt him. But I am not going to flaunt anything before him.”

“Dan—”

“Tass, do not quarrel with me, please!” All seemed to be quarreling, those days, quarreling with the others, quarreling within myself. In my own plea I heard the echo of a madman's roar.

“I will quarrel with you all I want!” she retorted. Then, as if she no longer wanted to be close to me, she found her breeches, her ragged tunic, and slipped outside to put them on. By the time I lifted the leather flap to follow her, she was already striding back toward the beach.

The moon had dropped far down the sky. Night was dying, and seemed very chill after the warmth of her bed. In silence I walked back to our campsite. Tassida was sitting by the embers of the fire and would not look at me. Kor lay wrapped in furs as if asleep. But I knew quite surely that he was not asleep, for I felt his waking presence, as I had sometimes felt it in Mahela's realm. I did not speak to him, or mindspeak, but let him think he was deceiving me. I lay in my bed, huddled in my furs, and did not sleep any more than he did.

In the morning we all three moved about as if in a waking dream, breaking camp. Tassida hailed Calimir with a whistle, and our two mares came loping in after him. They were not pleased to see us, wild things that they were, and we had to offer them cooked meat in order to lay hands on them. We ourselves did not eat. We put leather thongs to the mouths of the mares and rode them bareback, and without much talk we made the short journey to Seal Hold, where Istas lay dying.

Chapter Seventeen

Istas lay rotting away even as she lived.

The reek was awful in her small chamber within the rock. I have a steady stomach for most things, but I could scarcely bear it, or bear to look at her. Trying not to retch, I turned away. Tassida had not come in—she was seeing to the horses. As for Kor, he stood stricken by Istas's deathbed, his face chalk white beneath the bruises. This was the old woman who had mothered and badgered him through his youth, counseled him in his kingship, put on the regent's cap for his sake. She was like parent or grandparent to him, and she was the backbone of Seal Hold. Seeing her laid low staggered him so that he bent as if under a blow.